I generally reccomend one higher powered vid card over two in Crossfire or SLI, you get more bang for the buck, and better overall performance over two cheaper vid cards.......by customized cables, do you mean modular, or custom fit for your machine? The only company I know of (besides extreme modders) is PC Power and Cooling. They'll build whatever you want, but it's expensive. Corsairt's HX series are modular, and good all around.

Should run around $1,100 - and handle any game currently on the market. grab windows 7, 64bit and let it dominate.

FYI, i had to pick up a newer DVD drive, my old LiteOn from 2005 wouldn't read the windows disc. picked up a $25 one from wally world and it worked perfect...not sure if you planned on using an old drive if you would get windows.

you could easily reach $2,000 by grabbing more/faster RAM kit, a 1000w PSU, and maybe a faster GPU (like a 570 or 580)...i found the 560 to be completely sufficient at the moment though. basically another 100-150 for each higher model.

All told wiith shipping included. Should run about $3000, give or take. I had a few other things in that order. It's the system I built a few weeks ago. I know, you spec'd AMD, but the 960 will outrun anything AMD has available, including the 6-core. Take off the sound card ($200), four of the drives ($400) BD burner,and go with the stock Intel HSF, it'd bring it down to $2300 or so. I included shipping in there, eoo.

Ok, if modular then you are looking at the HX series from Corsair indeed. The wattage... yeah 800+ is where you want to go, above all you want your rig to be stable so not even getting close to any limit on your PSU.

Mine is Budget/Casual hence the 750W power supply/4GB of RAM etc.

If you really want to go budget we'll have to cut corners in the brands department so go with el cheapo components. This is nice if you want to have a gaming rig for a few months and then build a new one...

If you want to improve on things you can add SSD for your OS, a bit more memory, bigger PSU, more/bigger harddisks, BluRay burner...

I'm a bit surprised to see only LGA1366 rigs for the high-end gaming in here, why no Sandy Bridge system?

We hate rut, but we fear change.
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